Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/345

Rh in mind, as the sensation of visible objects as external to one another, but not as external to the sense perceiving them—he never maintains that because this sensation has been found to be accompanied by the sensation of tangible outness, that it will, when experienced alone, not only suggest the tangible outness, but absolutely be regarded as tangible itself, or be converted into the perception of a tangible object. He never, we say, maintains anything like this, as Mr Bailey represents him to do. It may therefore be asserted with hesitation, that there is nothing in the whole history of philosophical criticism analogous to the blunder of his reviewer. Nothing is easier than to answer a disputant when we confute, as his, a theory of our making.

Berkeley informs us, that visual sensation, that is, the direct perception of the outness of visible things with regard to one another, having been frequently accompanied with sensations of their tactual outness and tactual magnitudes, comes at length, through the law of association, to suggest to us that they are external to the eye, although we never see them to be so; and to suggest this to us, of course as the word suggestion implies, in the absence of the tactual sensations. Thus the visual sensations which, in the absence of the tactual sensations, call up the tactual sensations, resemble a language, the words of which, in the absence of things, call up the ideas of things. Thus the word rose, in the absence of a rose, suggests the idea of that flower; and thus a visible rose, not